This being so, the traveler is ill-equipped who goes through Egypt without something more than a mere guide-book knowledge of Rameses II. He is, as it were, content to read the argument and miss the poem. In the desolation of Memphis, in the shattered splendor of Thebes, he sees only the ordinary pathos of ordinary ruins. As for Abou Simbel, the most stupendous historical record ever transmitted from the past to the present, it tells him a but half-intelligible story. Holding to the merest thread of explanation, he wanders from hall to hall, lacking altogether that potent charm of foregone association which no Murray can furnish. Your average Frenchman, straying helplessly through Westminster Abbey under the conduct of the verger, has about as vague a conception of the historical import of the things he sees. What is true of the traveler is equally true of those who take the Nile vicariously “in connection with Mudie.” If they are to understand any description of Abou Simbel, they must first know something about Rameses II. Let us then, while the Philæ lies moored in the shadow of the rock of Abshek,[74] review, as summarily as may be, the leading facts of this important reign; such facts, that is to say, as are recorded in inscriptions, papyri, and other contemporary monuments. * * * * * Rameses II[75] was the son of Seti I, the second Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty and of a certain Princess Tuaa, described on the monuments as “royal wife, royal mother, and heiress and sharer of the throne.” She is supposed to have been of the ancient royal line of the preceding dynasty, and so to have had, perhaps, a better right than her husband to the double crown of Egypt. Through her, at all events, Rameses II seems to have been in some sense born a king[76] equal in rank, if not in power, with his father; his rights, moreover, were fully recognized by Seti, who accorded him royal and divine honors from the hour of his birth, or, in the language of the Egyptian historians, while he was “yet in the egg.” The great dedicatory inscription of the Temple of Osiris at Abydos,[77] relates how his father took the royal child in his arms, when he was yet little more than an infant, showed him to the people as their king, and caused him to be invested by the great officers of the palace with the double crown of the two lands. The same inscription states that he was a general from his birth, and that as a nursling he “commanded the body-guard and the brigade of chariot-fighters”; but these titles must, of course, have been purely honorary. At twelve years of age he was formally associated with his father upon the throne, and by the gradual retirement of Seti I from the cares of active government the co-royalty of Rameses became, in the course of the next ten or fifteen years, an undivided responsibility. He was probably about thirty when his father died; and it is from this time that the years of his reign are dated.